Nvidia to Invest $5 Billion in Ilya Sutskever's Startup
Nvidia is investing $5 billion in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI startup founded by Dr. Ilya Sutskever. The companies have also announced a strategic partnership.
Nvidia will invest $5 billion in the AI startup of former Israeli Dr. Ilya Sutskever, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), according to a Bloomberg report. At the same time, the two companies announced on Monday a strategic collaboration under which the startup will gain access to Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform — a powerful computing system for data centers designed for training and running large artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Sutskever is one of the founders of OpenAI and served as the company's chief scientist. He left in May 2025, about half a year after leading the failed move to oust founder and CEO Sam Altman. Sutskever completed his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto under the guidance of Prof. Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate in physics who is known as the "godfather of AI."
Sutskever founded SSI in June 2024 with the goal of developing safe, advanced artificial intelligence. The company focuses on long-term development with no intention of launching a product in the near future and operates under a veil of significant secrecy. In March 2025, it raised $3 billion at a valuation of $30 billion from funds such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and DST Global. A month later, Sutskever rejected an offer from Meta to acquire the company at a valuation of $32 billion.
Now, the company is raising $5 billion from Nvidia. The terms of the funding and the valuation at which the investment was made were not disclosed. According to a joint statement released by the two companies, access to Vera Rubin will allow SSI to increase its computing power by a significant order of magnitude. The two companies will also collaborate on the technical development of Nvidia's existing and future computing platforms by leveraging SSI's unique insights.
"Ilya is responsible for significant breakthroughs that underpin modern AI," said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang. "We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover using our Vera Rubin."
Sutskever added:
"We have research that is worth scaling, and access to a large Nvidia computer will allow us to do that. We are proud to partner with Jensen and the team at Nvidia, and are confident that our big bet on the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level."
